الاثنين، 17 فبراير 2014

RECYCLABLES: CRITICAL APPROACHES TO CULTURAL RECYCLING

There is nothing new about the practice of recycling. The recycling phenomenon has been with us for decades: artistically, culturally, and, more than ever, in our homes, we are accustomed to (or are becoming accustomed to) recycling our waste, our excess, our re-usable goods. But now the term "recycling" has also made a conspicuous appearance within academic discourse, emerging as a paradigm for understanding the way that artistic, literary, or cultural environments function. What can we make of this transposition: is recycling a valid paradigm for talking about literature, history, art, or theory? How might the term recycling nuance our understanding of the ways in which different social, theoretical, or cultural environments operate?

Our collection of critical essays intends to explore the rhetoric of recycling as a cultural, historical, and critical construct. We are particularly interested in investigating differences between recycling and other critical terms such as "appropriation," "bricolage," or "recoding." We welcome papers from across different disciplines that define/legitimize/question the subject of recycling. Contributions should shed new light on the already old idea of recycling. Papers might address, but are by no means limited to the following topics and questions:

Recycling and Aesthetic Queries: How has the aesthetic/cultural experience of modernity/postmodernity been shaped by a relationship to recycling? How have the concepts of "originality" and "genius" been reconfigured in a cultural context where simulacrum and pastiche are increasingly important?

Recycling and Cultural Memory: How do historical/autobiographical/ethnobiographical narratives recycle past events, materials, or memories in order to make claims about the past? What are the ideological implications of recycling as a mode of historiography?

Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property: What are the legislative implications for the concepts of authorship, ownership, and intellectual property under the aegis of recycling? If we view acts of cultural production as forms of recycling rather than acts of pure creation, how does this complicate our definitions of plagiarism?

Bio-recycling: Explorations in Cloning, or: How recycling took the sex out of sexual reproduction.

Recycling Critical Terminology: How does the term "recycling" differ from or share ground with popular critical paradigms such as bricolage, appropriation, (Deleuzian) repetition, différance, simulacrum, pastiche, eternal return, the nostalgia mode, the return of the repressed, etc.?

Recycling as Ethical Mandate: Sacrificing our goods for the (common) Good, or: Recycling as Ritual Between Exhaustion and Excess: What are the differences between a recycling practice prompted by the 20th exhaustion of resources and a more "excessive" recycling practice, in which recycling is a form of aesthetic play?

Production, Perversion, Pleasure: To what extent can recycling itself be considered productive or pleasurable? Does the idea of recycling negate desire? Or is there room for erotic play in a process of repetition? Could recycling be considered masturbatory? A symptom of private or cultural impotence? What might it mean to explore the physical, sexual, or puritanical aspects of a fascination with recycling?

Refusing to Recycle: How does a refusal to recycle "trash" different institutions (literary, bureaucratic, aesthetic)? Is there anything that cannot be recycled? What are the implications of an aesthetic or political refusal to recycle?

Recycling and the Information Age: What are the epistemological implications or limitations of recycling in cyberspace? If the Internet constitutes a utopic space of recycling, then what are the implications for us, its virtual ragpickers?

We are currently negotiating with University Presses for publication.Please send one to two page abstracts (by September 1) to: